Making a Balance Adjustment to Investment Account

Question

I crated some new IRA accounts to track 2 rollover IRA's and an SEP IRA at Fidelity.  I created the accounts in Quicken, and linked to my Fidelity account, but the amount reported in each account was significantly higher than the actual amount. I called Quicken and they directed me to Fidelity. I called Fidelity and they were finally able to see where Quicken had mistakenly pulled a higher value from a cash holdings account and said in 1-2 weeks, it would go away. Three weeks later, it was still off, so I read about how to do a cash balance adjustment. This seemed to work as the account now matches the online. The question is I created these as Cash Adjustments and they are showing up as very large expenses this year. These were only virtual transactions to correct the balance. Do I need to delete these and recreate them as a different type of transaction? Or should I delete the linked Fidelity account, and start over and see if it works correctly now?

Frankx · Accepted Answer

Hi @Moskose,

Can you give us some additional details about your issues?

You indicated there are 2 IRA's and a SEP involved - are all 3 accounts out of balance, or is the problem with one or two accounts - and which ones?

Were there "cash accounts" in each of the accounts are are out of balance?  If so, were these actual cash or bank accounts, or were these investments in "cash" funds (such as mutual fund money market" type funds?

Can you give me more information on the "Cash Adjustments" that you made?  What category or categories did you use?

Get back to us and we'll go from there.

Frankx

Moskose · Accepted Answer

Thanks for replying so quickly! What was happening originally is there was an amount Fidelity referred to as a cash "sweeps" account. The $ were transferred from Vanguard and I don't understand all the details but Fidelity said that Quicken was pulling this amount as part of the total in the account and it was apparently a temporary holding account as the $ were transferred. All three of these accounts were off by substantial amounts. I had a 4th Fidelity account which pre-dated the addition of the new accounts, and it has always matched to the penny. Now, those "sweeps" accounts are gone from each account (there was one line in each account, during the transition period) and the tracking looks to be correct.

Thanks for the last question - I immediately saw that these needed to be categorized as Adjustments and that fixed the issue!